Commonly used to seamlessly join dissimilar materials with different melting points, friction welding has been used to manufacture everything from airplane parts and rocket thruster tanks to even space shuttles and the razor-thin iMac.

But regardless of the intended application, the visual spectacle provided by forcefully joining two materials together with brute force is one of the most satisfying manufacturing processes to watch – or at least for some 21 million viewers on YouTube.

More recently, The Welding Institute (TWI) decided to take things a little further and shot the linear friction welding process between two bricks of titanium in 32x slow motion. Pioneered by TWI, linear friction welding is a solid-state joining process that has since become an established manufacturing technology for several niche aerospace applications.

This is a very small behemoth of an online community about 3D CAD, technology, design, robots, ninjas… Ok, maybe not ninjas so much, but those guys are COOL so there just might be something about some dang ninjas. Besides the occasional blast of intensely cool product design and technology, we look at what’s going on in the world of 3D, add a splash of business insight and web tech into the mix and there ya got your SolidSmack.

Fabbaloo is a daily online publication focusing on the 3D print and additive manufacturing industries. We provide deeper analysis of developments in current and future technologies as well as corporate matters. If there’s something happening in 3D technologies, especially FDM, SLA, SLS and Stereolithography, we’ll have an opinion about it.